Ethnic nationalism and weak institutions in the Balkans remain enduring threats to stability. Twenty years after the end of the Bosnian War and the signing of the Dayton Agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains culturally and administratively divided, weighed down by a barely functional and inefficient bureaucracy. The country, one of Europe’s poorest, has endured negative GDP growth since the 2008 international financial crisis and is reliant on the support of international institutions including the IMF. Youth unemployment, estimated at 60 percent, is the world’s highest.Kosovo has made progress toward full, multiethnic democracy, although tensions between Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbs remain.

In Macedonia, an ongoing political crisis and concerns about radicalization among ethnic Albanian Muslims threatens to aggravate already-tense relations between ethnic majority Macedonians and the country’s minority Albanians, fifteen years after a violent interethnic conflict between the two groups ended. Social tensions in the region might also be exacerbated if the Western Balkans becomes an unwilling host to significant migrant populations.